Cloud Elasticity: A Survey

Cloud elasticity is a unique feature of cloud environments, which allows for the on demand (de-) provisioning or reconfiguration of the resources of cloud deployments. The efficient handling of cloud elasticity is a challenge that attracts the interest of the research community. This work constitutes a survey of research efforts towards this direction. The main contribution of this work is an up-to-date review of the latest elasticity handling approaches and a detailed classification scheme, focusing on the elasticity decision making techniques. Finally, we discuss various research challenges and directions of further research, regarding all phases of cloud elasticity, which can be deemed as a special case of autonomic behavior of computing systems (This research has been co-financed by the European Union (European Social Fund - ESF) and Greek national funds through the Operational Program " Education and Lifelong Learning of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) - Research Funding Program: Thales. Investing in knowledge society through the European Social Fund.").